New Website: Redesigning Strata for Clarity

New website redesign process

The process of redesigning an existing and functional website can be fraught with risk and uncertainty and many times we find ourselves repeating the ever common saying, “if it ‘aint broke, don’t fix it.” But I ask you; if we took that approach literally as designers and architects, were would we be? What kind of world would we live and work in? After putting aside any risks and uncertainties, we took on the project of redesigning the Strata Architecture website.

Testing and Designing

Over the past two months we have redesigned and tested several options while doing our best to optimize the code for the ‘single best’ possible version tailored to our most common audience, our potential clients. The testing and design during this period is the reason for the discontinuity in the bi-weekly blog. We fully intend to resume posting regular articles and content but change the frequency to a monthly basis.

Plugins and Themes

In the process of redesigning, we opted to go with the highly customizable WordPress theme, Divi. Divi is a fantastic platform to use a scaffold in designing a customized experience. With Divi and several other plugins we were able to setup Amazon Cloudfront CDN to deliver all our images and content quickly and efficiently; we’re also able to offer an SSL encryption on the entire site via Let’s Encrypt (look for the green padlock in the address bar), and we’re also offering a highly optimized code which Google PageSpeed and Yahoo’s YSlow give an ‘A’ rating.